Meanwhile, on the share-the-hate-at-home front …

Speaking of the Danish cartoon controversy (as I did in the previous post), don’t think the furor over the Mohammad drawings is limited to anti-Western demonstrations and threats.

A team of 21 lawyers representing an Islamic cleric is pushing a judge in Yemen to give the death sentence to the editor of the Yemen Observer because he published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.

The editor, Mohammed Al-Asadi, told the Associated Press he is being prosecuted by both the state and a prominent Islamic cleric, Sheik Abdul majid al-Zindani, whom the United States has accused of supporting terrorism.

Editors of two other Yemeni papers that published the cartoons, Al-Ra’i al-Am and Al-Huriya, have also been charged with offending Islam. Their trials have not yet started.

As the AP notes, “It appeared unlikely that a court would hand down executions in any of these cases. Yemen, a poor, lawless, Arab country at the foot of the Arabian Peninsula, has a secular, U.S.-allied government that controls the judiciary.”

Although the Yemen Observer published thumbnail copies of some of the cartoons in its Feb. 4 edition, it covered them with a thick black cross to show its disapproval. In two accompanying articles, it condemned the cartoons and reported reactions from across the Muslim world.

The state prosecutor asked the court to impose the maximum sentence, but did not specify whether the editor should be charged under criminal law, which allows for the death penalty, or under the press law, which carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison, al-Asadi said.

Al-Asadi said the prosecutor left the choice of law to the judge before the trial, which was attended by representatives of Amnesty International, was adjourned to March 22.

Bill Dowd

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Mohammed al-Asadi gave this interview which was published today, to the Danish newspaper Information’s correspondent in Cairo. He was released on bail February 22, following international pressure. Al-Asadi is still in good health and managed o…